It’s all relative at the edge of physics

WE ALL know Albert Einstein, don’t we?

Yes, that old guy with the wild hair, the stock image for every lazy and unimaginative advertising executive whenever a mad genius is required. In reality, the Albert Einstein who developed the special theory of relativity in 1905 was a rather conservative-looking young man, a world away from that eccentric stereotype. And he wasn’t standing in front of a blackboard full of equations, explaining his theories to a rapt audience. He was living out a somewhat mundane existence as a clerk in the patent office in Bern.

We are also aware of Einstein’s most famous equation – E=mc².